Motivated by economies of scale from hosting workloads from thousands of customers and the resulting benefits from overcommitment and statistical multiplexing of load, service providers are setting up large virtualized cloud computing centers. However, many enterprise customers are unwilling to send their critical workloads into the cloud due to security concerns.
In current configuration of cloud computing centers, customers do not have control over where their workload is executed. As a result, when a customer's virtual machine is powered-up on a host within the cloud computing center, information in the virtual machine could be compromised in several ways. For example, the host could keep a snapshot of the virtual machine, do memory inspection, and gain knowledge of the customer's potentially sensitive data. In addition, the cloud administrator has virtually limitless access over the data and state of all virtual machines running for all customers. This includes reading virtual disks directly, and sniffing private virtual network traffic of a customer between two of his or her virtual machines.